More on Dual City here...

Below is some more information on the dual city here, taken from an article I've recently finished...

London and New York have undergone radical economic, social and political restructuring since the 1980s (see Castells 1991, Sassen 2001; 2006; Fainstein and Harloe 1992; 2003). During this period both cities emerged from their respective crises (see Thornley 1992; Tabb 1984) as strident global cities, successfully reversing the trends of population and employment loss that had predicated their respective declines in the 1970s (Fainstein and Harloe 2003: 157). The defining characteristic of a global city is the polarisation of occupational and wealth structures (Sassen 2001). This dynamic is the reason why many prefer to describe the global city as a ‘dual city’. The polarisation that has occurred in the last thirty years has been caused by the expansion of highly paid professional jobs, such as accountants, lawyers and merchant bankers; and conversely, low paid service jobs such as cleaners, security guards and waiting staff. Immigrants, especially female, arrive from a wide range of less developed countries to fill low-wage positions and may even work informally or in unregulated sectors with almost no protection at all (see Sassen 2001; 2003; Kwong 1997; McDowell et al 2009). The dual city thesis rests upon the idea that there exists in the metropolis two separate economies (formal and informal) and increasingly segregated neighbourhoods and social systems (Fainstein and Harloe 2003: 161). Yet these developments are very much related to the transformation- or colonisation- of the historical urban centre by capital as opposed to people. Lefebvre (1996: 81) argues that for ‘the old centralities, to the decomposition of centres, [the city] substitutes the centres of decision making’ (Lefebvre 1996: 81). Centres have also become sites of privilege premised on the ‘make-believe of the joy of living’ (ibid: 84), the ideology of consumption and more than ever concentrate the means of power, repression and persuasion (ibid: 85.

Mollenkopf and Castells (1991) chart the transformation of New York into a dualised global city. After the fiscal crisis of 1975, the city could no longer relied on an industrial base and transformed into a post-industrial financial and service based economy, a shift that mirrored the globalisation of capital. Berman (2007: 17) contrasts two decisions from the late 1970s that indicate how New York changed in pace with global capitalism. First was the closure of the Brooklyn Naval Yard, the city’s largest industrial facility, which employed a hundred thousand people at its peak and the second was the reorganization of investments around the enormous speculative real-estate enterprise of the World Trade Center. These changes were accompanied by a dramatic dissolution of New York’s blue-collar working class with immigrants providing the ‘casual labour’ needed to fill the few remaining manufacturing jobs. Although the city has become more ethnically diverse it has become increasingly polarised and segregated with the main contrast between a cohesive core of professionals in the advanced corporate services and a disorganised periphery fragmented by ‘race’, ethnicity and the spaces they occupy (Mollenkopf and Castells 1991: 402-3).

During the 1980s and 1990s London experienced the best and worst of times: ‘inner London […] was simultaneously host to the richest area in the European Union whilst containing the nation’s top three deprived boroughs’ (Butler with Robson 2003: 13; see also Hall 1998: 888-9). In describing the redevelopment of London’s Docklands Hall (2002: 398) explains how between 1981 and 1990 Docklands lost just over 20,000 jobs but gained 41,000 new ones, around half transferred from the City and half genuinely new. Yet ‘the lost jobs were very different from the new ones: port jobs disappeared, manufacturing stayed almost static, while the big gains were in advanced services, above all banking and finance […] and very few jobs […] went to local people’ (ibid). Hamnett (2003), however, offers a critique of Sassen’s polarisation thesis and argues there is no evidence of polarisation between low skilled and high skilled service jobs; rather only the professional and managerial occupations have grown, resulting in an overall upgrading or professionalization of London’s workforce. Sassen’s theory may apply to New York but for Hamnett it is less applicable to London where polarisation takes a different form, between the expanded middle class of professionals (see also Fainstein and Harloe 2003) and long term unemployed, retirees and discouraged workers who are exist effectively outside the labour force. For Hall (2009: 25) London is characterised, in apparent paradox, by both high unemployment and high immigration. Although Sassen and Hamnett disagree over the exact form that social polarisation takes their respective analyses concur that London and New York are subject to profound processes of widening income and wealth inequalities. As Fainstein and Harloe (2003: 163) conclude,
‘We can identify [in both cities] a close link between economic change and intensified poverty and deprivation, alongside soaring incomes for limited sectors of the population and a more ambiguous combination of costs and benefits for many more’.